People and machines have trouble managing knowledge and finding assets relevant to contextual activity in collaboration mediums. Existing solutions to finding assets include search engines, which can find assets on a computer network. Other applications for finding assets include desktop dashboards that monitor local system activity and present relevant items. In addition, relevant lists may be made available to the specific user. For example, Amazon® will show what others purchased, but will not show what one customer purchased that another customer might like. Other applications are directed to algorithms for determining relevancy of assets based on keyword, phrases, and association mapping. In each case, users are unable to share, as part of a collaboration activity, their relevant assets based on their preferences, profiles, and interactions.
Collaboration mediums include both synchronous and asynchronous forms and may include shared web applications, instant messaging, text messaging, bulletin boards, discussion forums, and shared whiteboards. Such collaboration mediums may provide peer-to-peer perspectives in which one user can search the assets of other users on the network. Moreover, technologies to view other users' shared files are known.
U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2003/0197729 A1 discloses that multiple users may access a collaborative data-sharing system during a data-sharing event. Each user can establish the level of sharing to be allowed with each other user and filtering criteria for filtering the data before it is provided to the other users. Data can be extracted from a number of different sources, including data input by other users and/or previously created information sources. For example, slides from a presentation on a similar topic may be identified and included by a user as a potential source of information to be used by other users. Shared data can be displayed on devices used by users to communicate with the collaborative data-sharing system. A user can select data provided by the collaborative data-sharing system, which was obtained from the data input by other users and/or from the identified additional data sources and added to that user's data as data entered by that user.
U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2005/0210396 is directed to a framework that allows a number of software application agents to be stacked on top of an instant messenger application. Each of the software application agents establishes a connection with a third-party external service on the Internet or a local application in the user's computer and enables access to the external services for users of authoring applications and users engaged in instant messaging sessions.
U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2005/0165935 A1 discloses a system for providing a local awareness client program user with document access information describing accesses to documents by remote users. The system provides document access information describing the documents accessed by one or more remote users, the applications used to access those documents, the times the documents were accessed, and/or other information describing the documents or the access to such documents made by the remote users.
U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2005/0076095 A1 discloses a system for managing messages and/or documents comprising a document server to store a plurality of documents and/or folders containing the documents; and a virtual contextual file system including a context mapping module to analyze a current context selected by a user at an access device to identify a subset of documents and/or folders stored on the document server associated with the context selected by the user, the context mapping module to additionally map the subset of documents and/or folders stored on the document server to the access device.
U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2003/0014759 A1 discloses a network-based system for recommending media content items based on user preferences. Clients contact a server on a periodic basis, independent of the user. In addition to client-server interaction, clients also interact with one another in peer-to-peer fashion. Peers query one another and evaluate their similarity to each other in an interactive comparison of user preferences. When two clients are sufficiently similar, the interaction culminates in the originating client downloading content listings from the targeted peer to generate suggestions for their user. If the two clients are dissimilar, the query may be terminated, or the targeted peer may route the query to a second targeted peer. In addition to the lists of preferences, the originating client may download actual content items from the targeted peers.